Bulletin of Electrical Engineering and Informatics Vol. 13, No. 3, June 2024, pp. 2067~2074 ISSN: 2302-9285, DOI: 10.11591/eei.v13i3.5896  2067 Journal homepage: http://beei.org MyPharmaceutical: an interactive proof of concept Khor Ying Jie, Zarul Fitri Zaaba, Mohd Adib Omar School of Computer Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Pulau Pinang, Malaysia Article Info ABSTRACT Article history: Received Jan 31, 2023 Revised Aug 6, 2023 Accepted Sep 14, 2023 With the rise of health awareness, pharmaceutical and cosmetic products should be verified to protect ourselves from health risks. MyPharmaceutical is a proof-of-concept proposed to provide a mobile application for users to carry out product verification and reporting and a web application for administrative purposes. The data on the registered pharmaceutical and cosmetic products were extracted from national pharmaceutical regulatory agency (NPRA) website. MyPharmaceutical mobile application provides functionalities such as searching the registered product, bookmarking products, reporting products, and tracking report status. The mobile application also implemented a barcode scanner feature to provide ease of product verification. A named entity recognition algorithm is applied with the NLP.js library to provide an improved product search feature for the users, where products can be searched with multiple search criteria in a single input. The web application is proposed to support the mobile application, where the NPRA data admins and officers can manage reported products, publish announcements, verify product data, and utilize the analytic dashboard. The system proposed is expected to provide ease of product verification and reporting to assist the public in choosing safe registered products and a platform for NPRA to manage data and deliver information to the users. Keywords: Barcode scanner Healthcare Mobile application Named entity recognition Web-based application This is an open access article under the CC BY-SA license. Corresponding Author: Zarul Fitri Zaaba School of Computer Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia 11800 Pulau Pinang, Malaysia Email: zarulfitri@usm.my 1. INTRODUCTION Healthcare is an important sector in Malaysia with the rise of health awareness in our population. According to a report published by the Malaysian Investment Development Authority (MIDA), the pharmaceutical industry is one of the areas targeted for promotion and development by the government [1]. As reported in the news, the country's market size of dietary supplements shows an upward projection of RM 2.27 billion [2]. The ease of purchasing health supplements in the e-commerce platforms contributed to increased sales of these products. However, this led to the illegal sales of unregistered health products in the online market, which caused many individuals who consume them to face health issues and side effects [3]. The current systems available, such as the websites of the national pharmaceutical regulatory agency (NPRA) [4], [5] and program perkhidmatan farmasi [6], assist consumers in verifying their pharmaceutical and cosmetic products or issuing a complaint about the products. However, the features provided by the existing systems are incomplete for the users to do both verification and reporting of products. Despite having such platforms, a survey shows that public knowledge regarding unregistered medications needs to be improved [7]. A survey conducted in [8] found that community pharmacists faced barriers to reporting adverse drug effects due to the need for knowledge on ways to report and the unavailability of reporting